Tag Archives: Folder Size

Analyze Hard Drives – Free Up Gigabytes of Disk Space in Seconds

Folder Size version 3.0.0.0 is released – a major version packed with plenty of new features and improvements. What is so important about this update?

Unicode ( Multi-language ) Folder Size Analysis

Folder Size did already scan files in multiple languages, but it could scan files in no more than 2 Languages at the same time. The second language had to be set as a language for non-unicode applications in the settings panel of Windows. This is no longer necessary and Folder Size can scan files in any language at the same time.

There is a brand new dialog box that can be used to select multiple drives or folder to be scanned. If there are more than one physical drives in the computer this will reduce the scan time dramatically as the only speed limit in the application is the one of the hard drive. The scan type switches automatically to drive or folder depending on the selection. If a combination is needed the drives can be added to the folders list via the “Add Folder” button. UNC paths can be added in the folders list for network locations – e.g. \\servername\c$ etc. The command line and drag’n’drop scan operations now support parallel scan too. Here is a preview of the new “Scan Multiple Locations” dialog:

Scan Multiple Locations – Drive Size Analysis

Bug fixes & Improved Folder Navigation

Using a mouse with forward and back buttons? Well this version supports them and you can use them for navigation the same way as in Windows Explorer. This release includes a lot of small bug fixes and improvement too, but they are not worth mentioning here. A full change-log can be found here.

Folder Size PRO – Professional Disk Cleanup Tool

MindGems provides 10 licenses for Folder Size PRO in this giveaway

Entering takes just few clicks – no endless surveys. Find the rules at the bottom of this post.

Folder Size is a popular disk cleanup tool. It can quickly scan all folders, drives, removable storage or network locations in order to display the distribution of the disk space. The results are presented using neat tables and charts and can be quickly sorted in order to identify the largest folders and the largest files. There are options to save the results, export or print, which allows the data to be stored for further analysis.

How To Enter This Giveaway?

Use the widget below in order to enter this giveaway. Once you log in via FB or e-mail there are multiple entry options. You can share, tweet, like, Google+ etc. Use the arrow that points to the right at the bottom of the widget to skip an entry option. There are 10 options that you can use in order to join the giveaway. If you use all the 10 options you have a higher chance to win. The more entries you make the higher chance you have to win this great tool.

The tweeter option will earn you an extra entry point for every person that joins the giveaway by following the link in your tweet.

How to List Largest Files & Largest Folders

Finding largest files and largest folders can be really handy in the disk cleanup process. While there is no built-in Windows option to do this there is a FREE Folder Size application that provides this information.

Folder Size is a small disk analysis utility that has also portable version that does not require installation. Listing the largest files and folders is just one of the many handy options of this neat little tool. It can print directory contents, scan network drives, folders, removable media, display the results in pie or bar charts, export the results to Excel, CVS, PDF, EMF, XML, JPG and other file formats.

Download and install Folder Size. Once the application is started select the drive or folder that should be scanned. The scan process is extremely fast and should be complete in seconds, but of course that depends also on the drive/folder size and speed. Once the scan process is complete all the files and folders are listed with their sizes and detailed information. See below how this looks.

Free Folder Size

Largest Files Report

List Largest Files

The Largest Files Report is accessible from the toolbar where you can choose the type of report that is displayed in the details view. By default the application displays the “Files and folders” report which is similar to the one of Windows Explorer, but provides details for the sizes of the folders, the count of files and sub-folders inside and many more. In order to activate the Largest Files report, click the arrow next to the currently active report type and select “Largest files”. (see the image on the left).

The report in this mode looks like the one on the picture above, but includes the top 50 largest files in the currently selected folder and all its sub-folders. Additional column displays the path for every file.

Selecting a different folder from the folders list on the left instantly updates the report with the largest files that are located inside. There is no need to scan anything further.

Largest Folders Report

Largest Folders

The Largest Folders report is the same as the Largest Files report, but lists the largest folders inside a folder or drive and all its sub-folders. All the information is presented in a neat report that can be exported in multiple file formats or can be printer or saved for further analysis. There is also a graphical representation with Pie and Bar charts and can be used for navigation too.

The top 50 largest folders are listed here too with their properties and sizes.

Mixed Largest Files and Folders Report

This is a combination of the above two reports and displays a mixed list of the largest files and folders. There are plenty of options that can be accessed via the context menu in all reports. There is an option to locate the file or folder in Windows Explorer, show the properties dialog, copy the path to the selected item, delete the item and many more. The option to remove the item from the list gives an opportunity to evaluate the results of deleting it. If and item is removed it can be easily restored by invoking “Rescan” on the parent folder that owns it.

While there are some similar applications Folder Size is FREE and provides the most accurate results in the shortest time. It is small and does not require much disk space and does not install any services or components that may slow down the system for a feature that is not used daily. Folder Size is a “must have” tool for the disk cleanup process. MindGems Inc. provides also some other popular tools some of which have free versions too. There is a free duplicate file finder and web gallery software, duplicate image finder and duplicate mp3 finder. The screen shots above are created with Easy Screen Capture.

Print Directory

How to Print Directory contents?

Printing directory is something that everyone needs now or then. Unfortunately there is no built-in option to do this in Windows. While there are plenty of commercial applications that can do this a free disk cleanup tool has this neat option and can print also to multiple file formats besides printing on paper.

Folder Size is a FREE tool aimed towards disk cleanup. Printing directory is the least that this tool can do.

1. Download and install Folder Size. Once it is installed on a computer it adds a context menu item in Windows Explorer named “Scan with Folder Size”
2. Navigate to the folder that should be printed and right-click the item in order to invoke “Scan with Folder Size”
3. The content of the folder is instantly displayed in the Folder Size application and available for analysis.
4. Use the File->Print option in order to print the content.
5. There are plenty of options that can be tweaked. The application can print to PPV (Print Preview), EMF, Multi-page TIFF or PDF.

The main purpose of Folder Size though is the disk cleanup process. This tools will scan and display the folder and file sizes for easy visualization of the hard disk space distribution. It can list also the largest files and the largest folders. There are plenty of export features that can save the data in XML, CSV, JPG and other file formats. Folder Size is free for personal use.

There is a short video that displays how to use Folder Size in order to Print Directory:

Folder Sizes in Explorer – Windows 7

Folder size information is not present in Windows 7 Explorer and there is a pretty good reason for that. Actually folder size is not displayed in any version of Windows Explorer. While this would be a very useful feature that helps to identify disk space hogs and help with the disk cleanup process there are huge performance issues related to it. A detailed explanation of the problem and a proper solution is provided in this article.

Windows 7 Folder Size Issue

The reasons for the folder size column to be missing in Windows Explorer is the fact that such information is not present in the file system. The folder size data can be collected easily, but that will lead to performance decrease in the file system. While the impact may not be so big for small count of files it may be huge while dealing with hundreds or thousands of files. There are plenty of other technical issues related to this. In Windows the files and folders can be locked by certain process which will make the data unavailable at certain point leading to incorrect results. Other issue may be related to a system crash or a power outage in which case the data will not be properly updated. Overall there are plenty of issues related to this problem and using an alternative solution is the best thing to do.

Window 7 Folder Size

Windows 7 Folder Size Free Solution

While there are some tools that run services in the background in order to collect this information they fall into the same problems listed above. Using a tool that integrates a column in Windows Explorer is not possible in Windows versions after Windows XP. Such tools have negative impact on the file system performance and suffer from the issues above. The best solution for this problem is to use a standalone tool.

The FREE Windows 7 Folder Size tool by MindGems Inc is designed to solve this problem. It follows the Windows Explorer design and is very intuitive to use. The tool can scan a terrabyte drive in less than a minute and does not affect file system performance while it is not in use. There is also Windows Explorer integration that adds “Scan with Folder Size” context menu for easy access.

Folder Sizes in Windows 7

Download the Windows 7 Folder Size tool and clenaup your system. Free up to 50% of your disk space in just minutes.

Folder Size 2.9.0.0 is now fully compatible with the Windows 8 operating system. The new release has also improved memory management for both 32 and 64 bit operating systems and can now utilize up to 3 Gb of memory on 32 bit operating systems and 4 gb on 64 bit.

Even though the application is extremely optimized, just listing the names of millions of files and folders requires a lot of memory. The application can now handle larger than 100 TB drives easily. If you are not interested in the file details a new option “Do not list files” is available in the settings. Using the option will dramatically reduce the memory usage and also improve scan performance.

The majority of the improvements are related to the print functionality where an advanced Print Preview option is implemented. The flexible new Print Preview dialog will not only let you preview the printed document, but also set margins and page settings, remove pages from print job, rearrange print order and more. There are also several options in the new print dialog that will let you save the print job to a PDF, multi-page TIFF, PPV or EMF file.

There is also a new export functionality that will let you export the content of the details view to a CSV format. A tool button near the report type selection is added for this purpose.

The standard complete export functionality in the File menu is preserved and extended with the Owner details. Exporting owner details is disabled by default in order to preserve the performance of the tool. If you need this information included your can enable it in File->Options->Export: “Export owner information”.

The installer now includes an option whether to create or not the ‘Scan with Folder Size’ context menu.

Folder Size 2.6.0.0 adds two new reports to the already available information. The largest files and largest folders report will list the information analyzing all the sub-folders of the selected folder. This means that if you select the root of your drive Folder Size will instantly list the largest files and largest folders that are stored in it regardless of their location.

You can now also see the total size of the selected items in the status bar. If there are no items selected the size of all the items listed in the details view will be displayed.

The filter option now allows multiple masks separated by semicolons. You can now search for example all the BMP and JPG files at the same time by setting the filter “*.jpg;*.bmp”

The professional version of the application can now scan multiple items via the command line and using Drag & Drop. You can scan multiple folders using the -scan command line option. The list of folders is delimited with semicolon. E.g. -scan C:\Folder1;”C:\Folders With Spaces”

The scan of multiple folder via Drag & Drop is also a very handy feature. For example you can use Windows Explorer search in order to find all the folders named “TEMP” then drag the listed results inside Folder Size in order to analyze them.

This new release is not only packed with many new features, but is also extremely optimized. It will perform five to fifty times faster than the previous versions making Folder Size the fastest application of this type.

We have now provided Personal and Professional versions that include important new features.

The flexible filtering will let you include or exclude different types of files and folders based on name, size, date/time and attributes.

Folder size now supports project files and can quickly save and load huge amounts of scanned data in small packed files.

The print feature will let you print the detailed list of the files and folders.

Some columns like file size, folder size, files count, folders count etc. are now formatted to the right for easier reading.

The professional version provides export feature and can save the scan results in XML or CSV files.

Some bug fixes are applied. Folder Size now will install for all user accounts by default. In previous version trying to use the application from another user account was leading to issues.

The free file size analyzer – Folder Size 1.9.5.0 is released with a fix for a major issue that caused a preliminary scan termination and incomplete scan results under Windows 7. We have not received reports for other operating system, but we recommend you to download this update.

Along with the fix for the above bug the user interface now uses the “Tahoma” font which looks much better and supports also the ClearType technology.